AI ‘arms race’ risks human extinction, warns top computing expert

NEW DELHI – Tech CEOs are locked in an artificial intelligence “arms race” that risks wiping out humanity, top computer science researcher Stuart Russell said on Feb 17, calling for governments to pull the brakes.

Professor Russell, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, said the heads of the world’s biggest AI companies understand the dangers posed by super-intelligent systems that could one day overpower humans.

To him, the onus to save the species rests on world leaders who can take collective action.

“For governments to allow private entities to essentially play Russian roulette with every human being on earth is, in my view, a total dereliction of duty,” said Prof Russell, a prominent voice on AI safety.

Countries and companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on building energy-hungry data centres to train and run generative AI tools.

The rapidly developing technology promises benefits such as drug discovery, but could also lead to job losses and facilitate surveillance and online abuse among other threats.

Alongside that is the risk of “AI systems themselves taking control and human civilisation being collateral damage in that process”, Prof Russell said in an interview at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi.

“Each of the CEOs of the main AI companies, I believe, wants to disarm” but cannot do so “unilaterally” as they would be fired by investors, he said.

“Some of them have said it in public and some of them told me it privately,” he added, noting that even Mr Sam Altman, head of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, has said on-record that AI could lead to human extinction.

OpenAI and rival US startup Anthropic have seen public resignations of staff who have spoken out about their ethical concerns.

Anthropic also warned last week that its latest chatbot models could be nudged towards “knowingly supporting, in small ways, efforts toward chemical weapon development and other heinous crimes”.

Human ‘imitators’

International gatherings such as this week’s AI summit provide an opportunity for regulation, although its three previous editions have only resulted in voluntary agreements from tech companies.

“It really helps if each of the governments understand this issue, and so that’s why I’m here,” Prof Russell said.

India is hoping the five-day AI summit, attended by tech bosses and dozens of high-level national delegations, will help it power ahead in the sector.

Indian IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Feb 17 that India expects more than US$200 billion (S$253 billion) in AI investments over the next two years, including roughly US$90 billion already committed.

Meanwhile, fears that AI assistant tools could lead to mass redundancies in India’s larges customer service and tech support sectors has caused shares in the country’s outsourcing firms to plunge in recent days.

These kind of back-end jobs in India are ripe for replacement with AI, Prof Russell said.

“We are creating human imitators. So of course, the natural application for that type of system is replacing humans,” he said.

Prof Russell is sensing a burgeoning backlash against AI, “particularly among younger people”.

“They actually are pushing back against the dehumanising aspects of AI,” he said.

“When you’re taking over all cognitive functions – the ability to answer a question, to make a decision, to make a plan – you are turning someone into less than a human being. The young people do not want that,” he said. AFP